Doing what you can with what you have
I am a perfectionist. A lot of the things I want to do don’t get done because I am afraid I won’t do them perfectly. This is why I don’t have a few dozen of my own novels on the bookshelf: I instead put my prodigious imagination to work coming up with little tasks and reasons why what I want to write is pointless.
When it comes to community service, I think many of us run into this same stumbling block. “I want to help, but I don’t have time to volunteer. I want to donate, but I’m not sure my donation would make a difference or that I’d be sending it to the right place. There are so many causes that need my support! I want to do the right thing, but there is so much to do. Where do I even start?”
On Oct. 16, I attended Sen. Mike McGuire’s virtual Hunger Town Hall, which featured Food for People’s Executive Director Carly Robbins, and I heard something that stuck with me. It’s not that complicated: They need food. Food for People doesn’t take food that’s expired or home-canned or half-eaten or potentially unsafe, but our local farmers, ranchers and backyard gardeners bring in meat and produce regularly. The mission is to get to food to people, period.
With Cal Fresh benefits pausing due to the government shutdown, food banks are anticipating a surge in need. Many of our community members are already struggling to keep their families fed; that struggle is about to get more difficult. It’s part of a systemic issue so tangled and huge that I am wrestling over how to write about it with nuance because perfectionist me wants to talk about it all and to do it in a way that will make everyone happy. Which, you know, is impossible. This is the ironic thing about perfectionism — you would think pursuing it would produce better results, but more often than not, it produces nothing. Perfection is a mirage.
At our family ranch in Honeydew our ancient orchard is surrendering the last of its bounty to the ground. I went and picked two bags of apples this morning because it’s what I can do. It’s not the only thing I can do, nor is it the perfect solution, but it’s getting food to people. And I found the train of thought that preceded this extremely small gesture hilarious.
“There are so many that I can’t reach because I don’t want to get on a ladder so what’s even the point?”
“A lot of them are stunted and even more of them have bird peck holes in them so what’s the point?”
“Apples have almost no protein and they probably have a bunch of them at the food bank anyway and they’re all going to go rotten because what kid wants an apple instead of a peanut butter sandwich, so what’s the point?”
“If I really wanted to make a difference I could have done this weeks ago, or I could have gotten some more people together and we could have tackled them in a more systematic way and gotten more.”
“I bet there are a lot of moms out there who need applesauce for their kids or babies but won’t have time to make it so if I really wanted to make a difference, I should process them into applesauce and then put it on Facebook because I don’t think the food bank accepts home-processed applesauce. But I won’t have time to do that, so what’s the point?”
“I should also make some warm bread if I’m going to make applesauce. That sound so cozy right now. Handing out loaves of warm bread and applesauce in the rain. But I don’t have time to make applesauce or bread. Also, why can’t I ever get my bread to rise?”
“I don’t have any boxes to put them in but I do have these bags, but will they squish the apples, and then will the food bank even take them?”
(And even as I was picking the apples, finally):
“I should definitely write about this but where would be the best place to write about it? Should I try to make it a column? What kind of sarcastic comments will [name redacted] make about this?”
But anyway, this is what I have. Two bags of apples, the back of a Subaru, a few musings about perfectionism and you, my lovely readers. Look, it’s not a lot. But it’s better than nothing. Things are rough right now. Don’t sit on your hands fretting over how to make the perfect decision. Let’s get to work.
Linda Stansberry (she/her) is a freelance writer and journalist who lives in Eureka.
This article appears in Halloween.